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French revolt against Macron’s support for Israel

A rally in Paris on 16 May to protest the Israeli massacre of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip two days earlier. Similar solidarity actions have been held around France.

Sadak SouiciLe Pictorium

Israel’s massacre of dozens of Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip last Monday is sharpening the divide between the French public and the country’s staunchly pro-Israel leaders.

Even before the latest massacre, one of France’s international giants, film director Jean-Luc Godard, had joined dozens of cultural figures saying they would refuse to take part in French government “cultural” activities designed to promote Israel.

Since Monday, people have demonstrated in solidarity with Palestinians all over the country, including thousands in the streets of Paris.

France has refused to take any such steps, but the government is clearly feeling pressure to go beyond the typical bland statements of “concern” and calls for “restraint” that have characterized responses from the European Union and its members since Israel began its weekly massacres of protesters in Gaza on 30 March.

President Emmanuel Macron on Monday finally “condemned the violence of the Israeli armed forces against the demonstrations,” according to his office.

These rhetorical shifts are, however, unlikely to assuage outrage that France is still refusing to take any action to hold Israel accountable.

Macron notably failed even to endorse the calls from other EU states for an investigation into the slaughter in Gaza.

He had criticized France’s weak response to Israel’s invasion of Gaza that year.

Writing in Le Figaro, de Villepin stated that it was France’s duty to “raise its voice against the massacre perpetrated in Gaza.”

He condemned France’s mere calls for “restraint” while “children are being killed” as well as one-sided support for Israel.

“Let’s have the courage to tell the truth: there is nothing in international law or in the right to security that implies a right to military occupation, even less a right to carry out massacres,” de Villepin stated.

With bluntness rare for a mainstream French politician, de Villepin said that Israel’s sole reliance on military brutality and its utter disregard for the rights and interests of Palestinians “condemns Israel, bit by bit, to becoming a segregationist, militarist and authoritarian state.”

“This is the spiral of apartheid South Africa before Frederik de Klerk and Nelson Mandela, made up of violent repression, iniquity and humiliating bantustans,” de Villepin added. “It is the spiral of French Algeria.”

This time around, most of the French center right has remained silent, but Israel has predictably found support from the far right.

Louis Aliot, a member of parliament from the historically anti-Semitic Front National, and the partner of its leader Marine le Pen, declared that in committing the massacre in Gaza, “the Israelis were defending their border.”

France-Israel season

Despite the growing outrage, France is pressing ahead with the Saison France-Israël – or France-Israel Season – a propaganda campaign backed by both governments to whitewash Israel on the 70th anniversary of the start of the Nakba – the ongoing expulsion and exclusion of the Palestinian people from their homeland in order to establish a discriminatory and apartheid “Jewish state.”

On Wednesday, two days after Gaza’s bloodiest day in years, France’s ambassador in Tel Aviv insisted that the France-Israel Season would be launched in two weeks as planned:

Left-wing lawmakers are amplifying calls for the cancellation of the festival.

More good news! Nearly 80 actors, directors, artists in France stand in solidarity with Palestinians, refuse to appear in Israeli gov-backed "France-Israel Season" series of events and urge others "not to participate in any form whatsoever." [in French] https://t.co/1sXQmTOt9W

Earlier this month, 80 French artists, including Jean-Luc Godard, published an open letter explaining why they would refuse to take part in the France-Israel Season.

The artists say that “under the cover of promoting dialogue and exchange,” the France-Israel Season is “really a means put in place by the Israeli government to burnish the image of the state of Israel that is being tarnished each day by its ever harsher policies towards the Palestinians.”

Solidarity across France

At the Cannes Film Festival this week, attendees observed a minute of silence at the Palestine pavilion in solidarity with victims of the Israeli massacre.

Vive la France! Delighted to learn that in your precious nation so many remain so sensitive to the WRONGED Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, and within Israel itself. They deserve RECOVERY of the independent community & nation they shared before 1948. (I'm a USA citizen, husband of an Episcopal priest, former teacher @ Robert College near Istanbul, retired professor from Rutgers U.)